To hell and back

SEX, drugs and rock 'n' roll took its toll on David Vaughan but now his big fix is a passion for his work.

WALK into the shambolic home of artist David Vaughan in Tameside and you get an instant understanding of the worlds that divide this passionate painter and his actress daughter Sadie Frost.

The Victorian house is packed with paintings. Whole rooms are full with ranks of canvases, some more than eight foot tall, painted in a riot of psychedelic colours, competing for space with piles of junk, books and furniture.

David Vaughan is completely obsessed by painting and he does not care how he lives as long as he continues to work to get down on canvas the truths about the universe he thinks he has glimpsed in his drug-fogged youth of the 1960s.

"My daughter is very famous," he says, as he talks about Sadie, whose celebrity marriage to actor Jude Law is currently the subject of much speculation amid rumours of an attempted, suicide, "but I refuse to be bought."

Unkempt, the 59-year-old has been working through several nights towards his exhibition Hallucinogenia at the Blyth Gallery in Manchester. "Everybody wants to find God," he says, "But nobody wants to go through the pain - I have."

Roller-coaster

This is a man who has been through the whole mind-bending roller-coaster of the Carnaby Street scene of the sixties complete with drugs, when he rubbed shoulders with the Rolling Stones, The Beatles and royalty, and has emerged with a hatred for the shallowness of stardom.

His life could have made the basis for an angry novel of the 1960s. The son of factory workers in Tameside, he went to art schools at Ashton-Under-Lyne and Bradford before going to the Slade in London, where he became part of the mad scene peopled by the likes of David Hockney and Yoko Ono, where mind-altering drugs, free love and partying was what one did.

"The Slade was a glorified finishing school," scowls Vaughan. "I felt that the only way to destroy the things that were wrong with the world was serenely through brilliant art, music, architecture and things to aspire to."

A lover of painting murals from the age of 15, he gained commissions from many sources, from the Expo 67 at Montreal to Lord John in Carnaby Street. His customised furniture was a knockout success - Paul McCartney commissioned him to customise a piano with a painted sunburst, while Princess Margaret bought decorated chairs.

Celebrated photographer David Bailey produced a series of photo-collages of Vaughan's work, which were turned into posters.

He was in charge of London's Roundhouse, and boasts he booked Jimi Hendrix for é50 to do his first UK gig. He seemed to have it made and was married to his wife Mary with baby Sadie, when his life fell apart.

He was working on a mural in a builder's cradle one day when he narrowly escaped death in an accident resulting from a poorly secured rope. In the aftermath, friends apparently wanting to calm him, doctored his tea with a giant dose of LSD. The resulting trip sent him off the rails.

Marriage

He spent three years as a down-and-out, his marriage fell apart and he lost touch for some time with his children Sadie and Sunny, before ending up in Manchester. Here he met his wife Ann, to whom he has been married for the past 30 years, and with whom he has three children. He also has two more children from another marriage.

Since then he has settled in Tameside and paints obsessively. He became involved in community art projects. He has decorated wards at various hospitals and donated paintings for auction for the Red Cross.

Today he is still driven by painting in the same psychedelic colours of his youth, which he uses to make statements against armaments, the prospects of war in the Middle East, genocide, rape and mugging.

He says: "Over the past few years I have been working on paintings which attempt to describe many of the social problems and world-wide horrors we have to live with.

"They are are an attempt to exorcise some of the phobias of a society gone mad."

Alongside these, he still produces images of the stars, despite the fact that he has contempt for the trappings of stardom, which is why he has an uneasy relationship with his daughter Sadie. Hallucinogenia incorporates a number of his portraits of rock stars of the sixties, including Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger, plus one of David Beckham.

"I am angry," says Vaughan, thumping his hand with his fist. "I just want people to understand some of the way I feel about the world by looking at my paintings."

Our newspapers include the flagship Manchester Evening News - Britain's largest circulating
regional daily with up to 130,485 copies - as well as 20 local weekly titles across Greater
Manchester, Cheshire and Lancashire.

Free morning newspaper, The Metro, published every weekday, is also part of our portfolio,
delivering more than 200,000 readers in Greater Manchester.

Greater Manchester Business Week is the region’s number one provider of business news andfeatures, targeting a bespoke business audience with 12,687 copies every Thursday.

Every month, M.E.N. Media’s print products reach 2.2 million adults, spanning from Accrington
in the north to Macclesfield in the south.